Doug Dohring – CEO Age of Learning / ABCmouse.com

Menu

Category Archives: edtech

As part of Age of Learning‘s commitment to help children everywhere build a strong foundation for academic success, we offer ABCmouse at no cost to teachers for use in their classrooms. For schools and districts, ABCmouse for Schools adds full home access for students, custom curriculum alignment, performance reporting, professional development, and more.

During the last school year, more than 145,000 teachers—including 1 in 4 kindergarten teachers in the U.S.—serving millions of students used ABCmouse in their classrooms. Students completed more than 100 million ABCmouse Learning Activities during the year.

For the 2018-2019 school year, we developed the following new features and capabilities for ABCmouse for Teachers and ABCmouse for Schools. You can learn more about these features from the following posts on the Age of Learning blog:

Summer matters. For those months of the year when children aren’t in school, engaging educational experiences can keep them from losing the progress they made. A major challenge during these summer months is ensuring that children retain the knowledge gained during the school year by preventing the “summer slide.”

Research shows that the summer slide has a significant, cumulative impact on academic achievement, particularly for children in low-income households. The summer slide is a key factor behind a stunning statistic: by the end of 5th grade, disadvantaged children are, on average, nearly three grade levels behind their more affluent peers in reading (source: The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading). And, according to the National Summer Learning Association, summer learning loss accounts for two-thirds of the achievement gap in reading between children from low- and middle-income households by 9th grade.

But there is hope. While the school year will start before we know it, there’s still time for children to reinforce what they learned the previous year and prepare for the next one. Engaging and effective learning experiences can help prevent the summer slide by getting children excited to continue learning over their summer break.

Mastering Math is an innovative, game-based adaptive early learning app (available for Apple/iOS and Android mobile devices) that helps preschool through kindergarten children build a strong understanding of the most fundamental math concepts: number sequences, numeral recognition, and counting objects. Having that foundation is a key requirement for success in kindergarten and beyond. The app uses appealing characters and personalized learning pathways to help children achieve mastery through practice.

The app leverages the Personalized Mastery Learning System developed by Age of Learning. This adaptive learning platform recommends and customizes learning games to deliver an individualized learning path and personalized education to every child. The app actively adapts in real time to a child’s existing knowledge, filling in gaps in understanding and teaching new material as the child demonstrates they are ready for more advanced learning activities. Using data from a child’s interaction, the system adapts the sequence of activities presented, and even adapts within each activity, to optimize each child’s learning experience and ultimately help all children achieve math mastery.

Current ABCmouse members can use the Mastering Math app completely free just by logging in. If you are not yet a member, you can subscribe through this app to begin your family’s ABCmouse learning adventure.

Congratulations to everyone on the Mastering Math team at Age of Learning!

Mastering the Alphabet is the second mobile app built on our Personalized Mastery Learning System, which creates an individualized learning path for every child. This is our first mastery app for language and literacy, and the first to offer offline access.

Mastering the Alphabet adapts which letters are presented to a child by balancing what he or she already knows and needs to learn with practice. The game further personalizes the learning experience by prioritizing the letters of the child’s name and by allowing children to decorate their letter blocks with custom art. With each demonstration of letter mastery, these letter blocks are brought to life with delightful animations that set the stage for reading success!

This new app is the seventh in our Constellation app series, following ABCmouse Mathematics and Science animations. You can learn more about the first six apps by reading this blog post on AgeofLearning.com.

Mastering the Alphabet is available to all ABCmouse subscribers at no additional charge; download the version that’s right for you at the Apple App Store or Google Play

After a little break from posting customer feedback, I’m happy to post this selection of feedback about award-winningABCmouseEarly Learning Academy that we receivedin June 2017. This time, however, I’m going to offer some of the amazing and insightful feedback we’ve received from parents and teachers referencing specific ABCmouse learning activities.

The game format, as children of all different skin tones walk through the forest environment toward their camp site, was an engaging way to teach/review the five senses. The integration of forest animal needs and adaptations with the five senses lesson made the whole activity very interesting!

—Mother of an 8-year-old girl in Austin, TX

This is a fantastic activity! I liked how you asked students to fill in the title and label the axis. I also liked how you asked students to move the bars and compare data. Great job on this one!

—Mother in Oklahoma City, OK

This ABCmouse activity was engaging and easy to watch and listen to. The diversity of characters was great for all children to relate to. I liked the game that was inserted within the lesson to teach the characters about the five senses. It was a good idea to relate the senses to the environment where the characters were and indirectly teach the audience as well. The format was great as it didn’t just list the five senses and provide examples; it taught within a story that would leave students wanting to watch and learn throughout the lesson to see the end result.

—Mother of a 7-year-old boy in Atlanta, GA

This ABCmouse activity was a fantastic way to practice sight words AND rhyming words!

—Mother in Oklahoma City, OK

Great example to help with writing. Good use of writing vocabulary. I like the before-and-after example of the child’s writing. I also like how you brought us intonation. We grade on that now.

—Teacher with a 6-year-old child in Los Angeles, CA

I liked the ABCmouse lesson using compound words first, then moving to prefixes and suffixes, and then finally words broken into syllables. For students, this presents more familiar ways of breaking words into smaller words that they can practice and understand. As the words change, students are introduced to harder words, however, if they grasp the concept in the beginning, they will be able to break apart and read any words.

—Mother of a 7-year-old boy in Atlanta, GA

A great way to teach story elements. A great on-level way to break it down and explain how to write a story with all the essential elements and details. All the key vocabulary was used: setting, characters, problem, solution, etc.

This study examined the impact of ABCmouse Early Learning Academy on summer learning loss (known as “summer slide”) in a diverse sample of 999 rising first graders.

Results showed that ABCmouse helped prevent summer slide in reading for students who regularly used ABCmouse for at least 70 minutes per week over the summer. Students who met this usage threshold demonstrated literacy gains equivalent to the benefits of one month of academic instruction, while children who scored below the median at the beginning of the study experienced even greater gains from using ABCmouse.